With the
help of Brother Brett Taira LC, Father Michael Mitchell LC
spent most of the month of March directing two humanitarian
missions in Mexico. Fr. Michael was ordained on December 12, 2011.He is originally from Cranberry, Pennsylvania, and now lives in
Chicago, where he works in youth ministry and is the
vocational director for the greater Chicago area. He
relates some of his recent mission experiencesbelow.

On a Saturday night in early March, 2012,
I stepped off an old bus in Rancho Nuevo, a
poor village in the state of Veracruz. An excited group of
villagers approached us and introduced themselves. As soon as I
told them that I was a priest, their eyes lit
up, and they asked if I would celebrate Mass for
them the next day. I readily agreed, and one of
the villagers took off to the church to ring the
bells. The church bells sounded throughout the sleepy countryside and
as soon as the bells stopped, a voice shouted over
a megaphone, “We have a priest in the village, and
we will have Mass tomorrow!”

What a beautiful way to start the
trip! The local priest could rarely make it out to

Father Michael and friends

this mountain village since he has to cover 30 small
villages altogether. He tries to come to the village once
a month, but, as you can imagine, it’s not easy
for him. The townspeople felt truly blessed that I was
going to be able to provide the sacraments every day
for an entire week! For a newly ordained priest this
was a real joy; I was walking on clouds the
entire week.

I was accompanied on the trip by a group
of high school students and their fathers from Mount
Michael Benedictine High School in
Omaha, Nebraska. Generous souls that they all were, they spent
their spring break at the missions rather than on vacation.
God blessed their generosity, as the mission trip proved to
be most fruitful. We built two houses for poor families,
and reroofed 11 other homes!

The next week found us in the
Mayan village of Nuevo Durango. This time we were with a group of young men
from Lincoln, Nebraska, who also took time from their spring break
to be missionaries for a week. Here we finished pouring
cement for the roof of the church and mission center.
This meant spending the greater part of two days carrying
buckets of cement up two stories and hoisting them onto
the roof. We also built the walls of a new schoolhouse

Missionaries build walls for a school house in Nuevo Durango

for the village. It was very labor intensive, but the
missionary spirit was running through our souls. We were literally building
the Church!

Each day I attended to the villagers’ spiritual needs through
confession, visits to the sick, blessings of homes and farms,
and above all, the Mass. For a newly ordained priest it was an awesome
experience; so many years of seminary formation and now I
could finally see the fruits! I met a young man
named Enrique got into a fight at a bar and
was dumped off at his home the next day with
a lump on his head. A local doctor said his
skull was cracked, and he had to go immediately to
the city for treatment. I heard his confession and prayed
over him before he was taken away. I never found
out what happened to him, but I know that he
was at peace with God.

We finished the walls of the schoolhouse,
and the roof will be put on by another missionary
team in the coming weeks. Our time in Nuevo Durango helped all of us
to grow spiritually and to grow in love for our
faith. Being a missionary for a week is an eye-opening
experience; all of us realized that we had received much
more than we had given!

For more
information on participating in a humanitarian mission to another country,
see www.demisiones.org.